Phoenix of Love

I don’t believe in umbrellas. This means that I occasionally get drenched when for one reason or another I have to walk a longish distance outside in a torrential downpour.
The reason I decline umbrella protection, though, is that being drenched by rain is really not a traumatic experience at all.
For the record, I do NOT [...]

While walking around downtown at lunch time and on the way to the train station, I often notice how the hurried businesspeople barrel down the streets leaning forward as though it will somehow get them to their destination a few seconds quicker. Sometimes I catch myself doing this as well.
When I drove to work, there [...]

One of the reasons that this business of not thinking is both tremendously simple and surprisingly difficult is that it isn’t about trying not to think so much as not trying to think. It’s no good smashing thoughts down forcefully as they arise, like that arcade game where you bop the alligator heads with a [...]

I’m considering designating my bedroom a no-thinking area, to fend off the encroachment of work-related deliberation into my sleep. It could be healthy anyway to have at least one place where I can take a break from the continuous churning of my neocortex. I can’t imagine that excessive rational thought is any more wholesome than [...]

I found the entrance to the sky where I
could never hope to be, where I could see
empires of fog (upstaging my existence)
caught in trysts with stone insanity.
I found it slashed in walls so high
that all my thoughts collapsed beneath the ground
to thrash in luscious silence and rebound
against their obfuscating sophistry.
I found the entrance to the [...]

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”
— Middlemarch

For an activity that fills roughly a third of our hours of life, sleep can be frustrating. Immersed in our deeply cerebral culture, we have trouble letting go of deliberative consciousness, and thoughts run over into every corner of wakefulness and knock against the boundaries of sleep. Meanwhile, we readily bring our analyzing, problem-solving brains [...]

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.
— T.S. Eliot

One of the most striking aspects of the Icefields Parkway, and one that I had not even considered before I was actually standing there on the side of the road, was the silence.
The only other place in which I’ve experienced such total, unbroken silence is in Death Valley. There was no background noise whatsoever. When [...]